The clock is ticking for the Winter Olympics. A chilling forecast projects that by the end of this century, only eight of the 21 cities that have previously hosted the Games will remain cold enough to reliably stage the event. Climate change isn’t a distant threat—it’s reshaping the landscape of elite winter sports right now.
Organizers for Milano Cortina 2026 are already grappling with the new reality: producing vast quantities of artificial snow, linking remote venues with complex transport, and constructing new infrastructure. These challenges are set to become the norm, not the exception, for future editions.
Pressure is mounting on the International Olympic Committee to act. In response to a petition demanding the IOC block fossil fuel companies from sponsoring winter sports, President Kirsty Coventry stated the governing body is “having conversations in order to be better” on climate. But talk is cheap—and the numbers tell a starker story.
A damning report from the New Weather Institute estimates that sponsors for the 2026 Games—fossil fuel giant Eni, carmaker Stellantis, and ITA Airways—will inflate the event’s carbon footprint by a staggering 40%. That’s enough emissions to melt 3.2 square kilometers of snow cover and 20 million tonnes of glacier ice.
Coventry, elected last year, has urged proactive dialogue, saying it’s better than “waiting for the climate to push us into a corner where we have to make rushed decisions.” Yet the fundamental question remains: what does a “sustainable” Winter Olympics actually look like?
Martin Müller, a professor of geography and sustainability at the University of Lausanne, highlights the opacity surrounding these mega-events. “Just constructing the baseline was difficult” for his research assessing Olympic sustainability from 1992 to 2020, he notes. “Even for newer events, some very basic data is hard to find, which tells us about the need to improve transparency for these multi-billion-dollar undertakings.”
The IOC’s own sustainability framework has faltered. Launched in 2000, the Olympic Games Impact (OGI) initiative set 126 economic, environmental, and sociocultural indicators, mandating host cities to work with independent research partners. It was scrapped in 2017 after hosts complained about its rigor. The result? Organizers can now make any sustainability claim they want, with little accountability.
Müller’s team found that every recent Games bills itself as sustainable, but the rhetoric rarely matches reality. To cut through the noise, they’re building a database to measure mega-event sustainability from 1990 to 2024. They define a sustainable sports event as one that “minimises its ecological impact and promotes social wellbeing by ensuring its economic viability and implementing accountable governance in a long-term perspective.”
That economic viability is under intense scrutiny. Müller argues the Olympics are “loss-making ventures that lack financial sustainability,” reliant on external subsidies to exist. The data backs him up.
Researchers Alexander Budzier and Bent Flyvbjerg from the University of Oxford analyzed every Games since 1960. Their finding? Costs consistently blow past forecasts by an average of 159%—195% for Summer Games and 132% for Winter Games. Milano Cortina 2026 is already following the script: spending has hit $1.7 billion, overshooting the original $1.3 billion budget. An extra $3.5 billion in public funds has been funneled into infrastructure upgrades.
Organizers typically budget a 10%-15% contingency, but Budzier and Flyvbjerg point to a chronic “optimism bias”—hosts assume low future inflation, ignoring historical trends. The scale of Winter Olympic projects is so massive that financial tracking often breaks down, sometimes accidentally, sometimes not.
At Sochi 2014, an investor admitted, “we were in such a hurry in the end that we didn’t count the money.” At Nagano 1998, financial records were deliberately destroyed. This culture of fiscal ambiguity can’t continue if the Games are to have a future.
The path to sustainability might lie in the IOC’s revenue model. Between 2017 and 2020/21, 91% of the IOC’s $7.6 billion revenue came from TV broadcasting and sponsorship rights. Even during the spectator-less Tokyo 2020 pandemic Games, 91% of the $5.7 billion revenue from 2013-2016 stemmed from broadcasting and marketing.
Of the estimated 930,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent from Milano Cortina 2026, 410,000 tonnes will come from spectator travel. Müller believes the IOC can prioritize the environment “more easily than other sectors” because it wouldn’t need to overhaul its business model. “The tourism part is high carbon, so the question is, how do you reduce the high carbon tourism part while keeping the media part? It doesn’t create many carbon emissions to actually create these images,” he says.
Müller proposes a geographic contingency scale for ticket pricing—making it more expensive to fly across the globe to attend. He notes most fans watch on screens anyway, and ticket demand stays high regardless of local sales. His team also suggests spreading each Winter Olympics across multiple locations to slash long-distance travel. This approach would favor hosts with existing venues, reducing the need for costly new builds.
Prospective hosts are already pushing for a smaller, more feasible Olympic footprint. If the IOC sticks to the status quo, Müller warns the Games will “enter a period of rapid decline.” That could mean fewer cities bidding due to runaway costs, and local communities rebelling against overtourism.
“In the end, this leads us back to rethinking what these events are about,” Müller concludes, “the sports and athletes at their centre.” As reliable snow and ice become scarcer, the Winter Olympics face a brutal choice: adapt or become a relic of a colder past.
